Public awareness regarding low levels of natural resources is recently more aggressively introduced in our daily life. Since alternative resources cannot fully compensate the lack of natural resources, keeping consumption like electricity and gas to a minimum is becoming a necessity. As a consequence, low individual consumption and appliance efficiency are key.
Devices directed to measuring the consumption of the appliances within a house are known in the art, as for example the ones described in US20120016608 or GB2488164.
US20120016608 defines a device capable of measuring electrical parameters and detecting electrical features of appliances. The device compares the electrical features with appliance information recorded in a database of a local-end system. In case the appliance information is not matched, the local-end system transmits the electrical features to a server for a more complete comparison. Such a device requires a high computational power for processing the measured electrical parameters and therefore fails to offer an efficient solution with a low cost implementation.
GB2488164 defines a system capable of recognizing types and classes of appliances and their energy consumption from raw energy sensor data. The system comprises a sensing component where environmental sensing and data collection takes place and a server component which hosts the data computation and data analytics means. The collected data is processed through mathematical functions like: mean, standard deviation and root-mean-square and sent through a communication link to the server. Such a device uses a lower computational power but fails to offer a reliable and easy implementable solution since it requires a continuous open communication link between the sensing component and the server.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide an improved energy management system increasing the efficiency in monitoring the energy consumption while providing the ability of a consumer to follow-up the energy consumption characteristic in real-time from a remote location.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a real-time energy consumption follow-up while keeping low computational power on the sensor and/or avoiding extensive data streaming.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide an energy management system that outputs an accurate consumption characteristic and keeps, at the same time the overall manufacturing costs to a minimum.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a device that enhances public awareness regarding energy consumption at a particular moment in time or within a defined time period. The device being able to output the electrical characteristics and consumption evolution of a plurality of appliances within the defined period of time and help the user identify appliances that are not functioning within the optimal consumption range anymore.
The present invention meets at least one of the above objectives by providing an energy management system and method as further described in the description of the invention.